AMD "Piledriver" refresh of Zambezi - info, speculations, test, fans

[-Boris-]

But offer vastly different performance. The point is to get as much performance per watt.


Westmere EX had 2.6B transistors, 513mm^2 and burns the same power as a BD and it outperforms it in more or less anything. While I agree that GF's process is not as bad as people think ( performance wise, not yield wise ) it still has some challenges to overcome.

Btw, BD isn't 2B transistors, it's actually 1.2B ( a much more realistic number, the other one left 800m transistors unexplained, 1 module = 213m x 4 = 852m for the cores and L2, add another 380 for the L3 and you end up with roughly 1.25B )

My point is that even Intels power efficient 32nm gets a lot worse when making huge chips. And your calculations is wrong, no way that L3 just uses 380 million transistors. The difference between Athlon II and Phenom II is 6Mb cache and roughly 450M transistors. My math would say 852m for cores and 600m for L3, and then IMC and HTT eats a lot to. So it's safe to say that it's way above 1.2 billion transistors, more like 1.7 billion+.

AMD has so far only made 1.5 and 2 billion chips at 32nm, no wonder they both produce a lot of heat and don't reach higher clocks than they do. Intel waited almost 2 years before launching such large chips at 32nm.